Avahi on Breezy followup
So after I posted some instructions for setting up Avahi on Breezy, a fair number of people at UBZ did so. For most people this worked fine, but it seems that a few people's systems started spewing a lot of network traffic.
It turns out that the problem was actually caused by the
zeroconf package
(which I did not suggest installing) rather than Avahi. The zeroconf
package is not needed for service discovery or .local name lookup, so
if you are at UBZ you should remove the package or suffer the wrath of
Elmo.
Comments:
torkel -
What kind of traffic?
Was it spewing a *lot* of ARP-requests by any chance? In that case I have been hit by it too ;-)
/torkel
Phil -
I heard Gaim is avahi-enabled. Is that what you're talking about using? Are there Ubuntu packages for this yet?
Chris Cunningham -
I heard Gaim is avahi-enabled
HEAD is, no released build is. Certainly not the current Ubuntu package.
- Chris
James Henstridge -
torkel: yes, I think that is what was happenning. It looks like there is an updated version of the zeroconf package that fixes this, but it isn't in Breezy.
Trent Lloyd -
Last check, gaim was not avahi enabled, but it does support the network-iChat stuff apple uses using Howl, and avahi svn (yet to be released as 0.6) features an API/ABI compatible layer for Howl (and bonjour) so you could use it with this.
Anand Kumria -
This was found and fixed some time ago in zeroconf 0.3 (fixed on the 12th July -- almost 4 months ago).
Updated packages are already in Debian testing (i.e. Ubuntu Dapper) and everyone ought to be able to grab it and try it out.
Davyd -
What does zeroconf do that NetworkManager doesn't do?
Also, Gaim now supports the iChat protocol? That is pretty rad, when I tried it out some time ago it didn't work.
anti -
Well, you indirectly did recommend to install zeroconf: The package is recommended by libnss-mdns which in turn was recommended by your post :-)
So, if the package installer of choice is configured to install recommended packages (default for e.g. aptitude) - that's why it was installed.
James Henstridge -
Hi Anand,
It looks like the release with the fix came out a little after the upstream version freeze for Breezy:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BreezyReleaseSchedule
Since this problem annoys network admins enough though, so the fix might be released for Breezy as an update or backport.
torkel -
And it can also more or less bring down some routers... :-(